In a chilling narrative of brutality and retribution, a woman who was complicit in scouring the murder scene of Hamilton resident Sao Yean has been handed a prison sentence for her part in the abhorrent act.
Teretere Taniwha is the final link in a chain of individuals incarcerated in correlation to the murder of Yean, also referred to as Sao Young. His decimated and maltreated body was shockingly unearthed a month after his final known sighting in March 2020.
The tragic end of Yean was horrifically violent. He was brutally beaten to death, and his lifeless body discarded in a water trough on the periphery of Hamilton in the bleak early hours of March 13. His body, by sheer luck, was discovered a month later by a local farmer, amidst the peak of the first Covid-19 lockdown.
In the progression of justice, Mihingarangi Tynneal Rameka, Daniel Payne, 35, and Neha Wiremu Grey, 40, were all handed minimum prison sentences of 18 years in September, implicated in Yean’s death within the confines of Rameka’s garage. The savagery inflicted on Yean that night was so severe that his assailants felt the need to subdue his screams with music blasted from a speaker.
By 6.15 am, after enduring over three hours of relentless attack, Yean succumbed to his fatal injuries. Grey and Anton Rite, who later received an 11-year sentence, then callously discarded his body in a water trough on a property in Gordonton.
Taniwha, Rameka’s half-sister, was accused of being an accessory after the fact for her grim role in cleansing the blood-stained garage, a task that extended to the disposal of a blood-soaked carpet.
Moreover, Taniwha was faced with charges for causing intentional infliction of grievous harm to Dean Mihinui and unlawfully detaining and harming Jesse Whitiora. She admitted her guilt a week before the rest of the accused were subjected to a trial in the High Court at Hamilton in May this year.
The plot took a further dark turn as the day preceding Yean’s last sighting, Taniwha was implicated in a car chase, that resulted in Mihinui’s vehicle being run off the road. The car’s occupants forcibly confined Mihinui and subjected him to a horrifying ordeal in Rameka’s house including a brutal attack with a baseball bat.
Whitiora also faced a fate of unprecedented violence when he was detained against his will, beaten with a baseball bat, and cruelly tasered on the night of March 12. This cycle of retribution originated from the untimely death of Black Power member Christopher Matatahi, who succumbed to a drug overdose following a New Year’s Eve party thrown by Rameka in Hamilton in 2019.
Despite being furnished with these drugs by an associate on the condition that they were not adulterated with heroin, Rameka, an expectant and jittery drug dealer with firm connections to the Mongrel Mob, along with Payne, a high-ranking Black Power enforcer, sought vengeance for Matatahi’s death. The aggrieved pair targeted Yean solely based on his friendship with Whitiora, and his association with a rival gang.
Stemming from these events, Taniwha, a young impressionable 18-year-old then living with Rameka, found herself embroiled in the murder aftermath. Despite the significant changes and maturity that Taniwha demonstrated following her arrest, and her positive rehabilitation prospects, Justice Grant Powell sentenced her to a two-year term and 11 months of prison. Her involvement in the saga serves as a disturbing reminder of the irreversible fallout of gang violence and drug abuse.
